Not Just a Notebook… a Notebible

May 14, 2008 No comments

My life would be incredibly simple if I could just park my behind in front of one computer, on a regular basis, and write for large uninterrupted blocks of time. Unfortunately, my life doesn’t facilitate that. In order to achieve any sort of productivity, a lot of the writing I do is on the fly. A few minutes before work, coffee breaks at the day job, standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for the wife to finish trying on cute little slingback pumps at the shoe store. Any moment, I need to milk it for what it’s worth. At home, if the wife wants to use the one computer we’ve got and I want to write, I have to resort to other means. So I’ve got my files on the computer. I’ve got documents on the Alphasmart. I’ve got scribbled notes in the Moleskine. I’ve got stuff in Google docs, stuff I’ve emailed myself from my phone, reminders and ideas passed in text messages via IWantSandy. All of which leads to an ungodly mess of information scattered higgledy-piggledy that I need to sort out later.

Thus, I came up with The Notebible.

Currently there’s only one Notebible, the one I’m using for DoubleZero. There will be other Notebibles, one for each project, as I move back into working on multiple projects. It is the be-all, end-all, Grand Central Station and Final Resting Place of information on the project. The Notebible is a standard three-ring binder. Into it I dumped numbered tab dividers. Behind the tabs I have a pocket folio, the kind that opens to two facing pockets, punched to fit into the binder. Behind that, blank notebook paper, but not too much of it because the point is to keep the thing relatively empty.

The pocket folio holds the current manuscript, or as much of the section I’m editing that will fit into the pocket. The manuscript is loose pages. The left pocket is for pages I’ve already taken a red pen to, scribbled note on, and/or defaced with a highlighter. The right pocket is for pristine pages I have yet to editorially brutalize. This allows me to do proofreading on the fly as I have a minute or two. Read the text page from the right, scribble notes on it, move it to the left.

In front of the tabs, in the front of the binder, is a single sheet of paper. Behind each tab is a single sheet of paper. I don’t label the tabs or organize them in advance, because I won’t know what I need until I know that I need it. As I come up with a sub-project that needs to be worked on, something that will require research or multiple steps, I go to the blank page in the front and write “1. Whatever”, which “Whatever” being the subsection. For example, in DoubleZero, I may get an idea about Gadgets. I would write “1. Gadgets” on the front page, then turn to the blank paper behind Tab 1 and scrawl my notes on Gadgets. When I get another idea for a sub-section/sub-project, I’ll mark that as “2.” regardless of where it falls into the manuscript. If I have to move to a second sheet of paper, it means I need to take some time to process and work on that section.

As I finish a sub-project, or at least finish the steps listed on the sub-project tab page, I tear it out and cross it off of the front index page. So once I’ve addressed the notes I made on Gadgets, for example, I tear out the page, and cross “1. Gadgets” off the front page. Now that slot is open for the next wild idea I get.

Periodically, I review all of my sources against the Notebible. I copy notes out of the Moleskine into it, and make new tabs as needed, then cross those notes off in the Moleskine. I check the emails to myself and the Sandy reminders, copy the thoughts into the Notebible and delete them. When I get writer’s block at the computer, I check the Notebible and find some other piece that needs to be done or pull out the piece of manuscript full of red ink and update the primary doc file. The same goes for heading out with the Alphasmart — I can either take the Notebible, or set up a file or three in the Alphasmart with the notes on what needs written.

The main difference between this and other writer’s/gamemaster’s notebooks I’ve set up in the past is that this is in no way intended to be a usable reference or finished product. I’ll be using the Notebible format for some campaign worlds I want to develop, but this would never be the book I lugged to an actual game session. Finished products will go into some other format, be it another binder, a pdf document printed out and bound, a wiki, or something else.

So far this is working well for me. I intentionally picked the ugliest binder I could find so I wouldn’t be tempted to decorate it and prettify it. It’s utilitarian to a Soviet degree. It keeps me focused on the work and lets me keep my head around a long project with multiple parts. Your mileage, of course, may vary.